This paper reviews the issues of concern in writing scale development in English as Second Language (ESL) settings with an intention to provide a useful guide for researchers or writing teachers who wish to develop or adapt valid, reliable and efficient writing scales considering their present assessment situations. With a brief discussion on the…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the writing skills of incarcerated males and to examine differences in these skills based on age and race. All participants (n=115) were male, so gender was not analyzed. Data analysis consisted of descriptive statistics as well as a Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). Results indicated wide…

This study examines score variations and differences in the reliability of ratings between English-as-a-second-language (ESL) and native English (NE) authored papers in a graduate course. Generalizability (G-) theory was used as a framework for analysis because it is powerful in detecting rater variability and the relative contributions of…

This article describes the writing of one third-grade English-language learner (ELL) to illustrate how generous reading can provide a bridge for ELLs when their writing is not yet ready for a more judgmental reading. It presents a formalized approach that builds upon students' linguistic strengths and traces their written words to sources in the…

Measuring the Academic Skills of University Students is a procedure developed in the 1990s at the University of Sydney's Language Centre to identify students in need of academic writing development by assessing examples of their written work against five criteria. This paper reviews the literature relating to the development of the procedure with…

This paper reports on the feedback and assessment practices of Canadian grades 4-8 teachers; the data are drawn from a national study of the teaching of writing at the middle grades in all ten Canadian provinces and two (of three) territories. Respondents were 216 grades 4-8 teachers from rural and urban schools. Data sources were audio-recorded…

E-rater[R] is an automated essay scoring system that uses natural language processing techniques to extract features from essays and to model statistically human holistic ratings. Educational Testing Service has investigated the use of e-rater, in conjunction with human ratings, to score one of the two writing tasks on the TOEFL-iBT[R] writing…

Various factors contribute to variability in English as a second language (ESL) essay scores and rating processes. Most previous research, however, has focused on score variability in relation to task, rater, and essay characteristics. A few studies have examined variability in essay rating processes. The current study used think-aloud protocols…

This study analyzes the methods that teachers employ in written feedback to student writing and how the policies of the program and the teachers' embodied histories influence the strategies used. Data were gathered from 2 novice teachers as they taught their first graduate-level ESL writing course and consist of the teachers' feedback in addition…

In this article I present some findings of an action research study intended to find out to what extent a teacher-student partnership in writing assessment could promote high school students' autonomy. The study was conducted in a U.S. school. Two main action strategies in the assessment process were the use of symbols as the form of feedback…

Heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the United States form a very complex and diverse group of learners. Research in heritage linguistics has examined key parameters of the HSs' oral production. Important work has been done in heritage language (HL) pragmatics, morphology, and lexicon. However, very few studies have been conducted to…

In this study, 72 secondary English teachers from the Santa Ana Unified School District were randomly assigned to participate in the Pathway Project, a cognitive strategies approach to teaching interpretive reading and analytical writing, or to a control condition involving typical district training focusing on teaching content from the textbook.…

This study investigated the effectiveness of portfolio-based writing assessment in EFL situations. Participants were 40 pre-intermediate young Iranian English learners. They were randomly divided into experimental and control groups of 20 each. The experimental group wrote on five pre-established topics from their coursebook. Their writings were…

Whereas grading systems based on tacit knowledge may be the norm in practice, the recent trend toward educational accountability--from granting organizations, accreditation boards, journals on the teaching of psychology, and even tenure/promotion committees--suggests a real need for reliable, validated assessment measures that can be used to…

Academic writing and education in foreign and second languages both have lengthy histories. Their histories have diverged but also intersected. Matsuda (2005), for example, described the convergence in policies that led to a distinctive discipline of "L2 writing" in higher education in the U.S.A. during the latter part of the 20th century.…